WHAT POSTMODERNISM CAN DO FOR PSYCHOANALYSIS: A GUIDE TO THE POSTMODERN VISION

摘要

The critics of postmodern psychoanalysis hide the power of this new vision by replacing its technical concepts with homonyms, that is, with ordinary language terms that sound the same but have different meanings. Translated in this way, postmodernism sounds foolish, but it is rather like trying to understand ego psychology by interpreting "ego" as meaning something like "arrogant." For example, the critics seem to think of "de-centered" in terms of the vernacular concept of being "unbalanced," but the postmodern term decentered means something more like "putting oneself in the other person's shoes" or "looking at the world, empathically, as if from the other person's consciousness." The critics of postmodern psychoanalysis, therefore, have simply reduced postmodernism to a straw man theory that no one should endorse. Even so, there is something inconsistent in their critique. Their major complaint seems to be that postmodernism is insufficiently objective. We might take this to mean that they believe it is too metaphorical, too prone to create imaginative pictures, too little anchored in hard facts and a belief in hard facts. If this is their main criticism, it is paradoxical that a critic such as Leary makes her major arguments against postmodernism in the language of rhetorical metaphors.